Pretty soon after beginning his two-week descent into the Dantean world of the modern deep-sea North Atlantic trawler, Redmond O’Hanlon, far too old to be anywhere near one of these boats, let alone in January, let alone with a Force 12 Category One hurricane in the offing, not to speak of the burden of being ‘Worzel Gummidge’ or ‘Mister Writer-Man’, as the trawlermen call him, with his incomprehensibly expensive camera equipment and his vast literary-cultural-natural-historical baggage, lies in the cramped coffin of his bunk and starts to feel sick:
His body responds to instructions and he spends the next hour or so staring at the bowl of the trawler’s own loo, encrusted with the endlessly layered evidence of previous visits, to which from time to time he adds some more.My gullet and stomach rose out of my body. Up above the trawlermen they flapped right and left, like fish-tails; still rising, they jinked and dipped and surged; they broke surface and, like dolphins, leapt undulating forward on the mass of a bow-wave. Go on, said the sequence of disjointed, feverish images, get this slimy head, get this long fat nematode worm of a body out of this burrow of a sleeping bag and extrude the whole lot into the lavatory.
We have all, I am sure, stood on the quayside, probably outside Rick Stein’s restaurant in Padstow, looking down, hands in pockets, into the rusty and incomprehensible guts of a trawler, full of hideously aggressive gear, a dieseled up mess of a floating abattoir, shuddered, clucked and headed off for a little Gew
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